Top 200 Jack Welch Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The last thing you want to do is be a bore. When you wake up in the morning, give yourself a good mirror test. If you look like you’re going to be a sulking, pouting bore, slap yourself in the face before you go out to the office.”

— Jack Welch

102. “Approach every meeting with a purposeful, high-energy, ready-to-make-a-contribution attitude, and watch how fast leadership’s perception of you follows your behavior.”

— Jack Welch

103. “People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t rocket science. We’ve chosen one of the world’s simplest professions.”

— Jack Welch

104. “When it’s time to let someone go, do it right. No surprises. No humiliation.”

— Jack Welch

105. “Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today’s world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.”

— Jack Welch

106. “If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.”

— Jack Welch

107. “One of the things about leadership is that you cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You’ve got to be on the lunatic fringe.”

— Jack Welch

108. “If you get the best people on your team, you’ve got plenty of time to do the things you like to do and can add more value to.”

— Jack Welch

109. “If you reward candor, you’ll get it.”

— Jack Welch

110. “Don’t lose youself on the way to the top.”

— Jack Welch

111. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of all employees are in the pile because they don’t think.”

— Jack Welch

112. “One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.”

— Jack Welch

113. “You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.”

— Jack Welch

114. “My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”

— Jack Welch

115. “For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter.”

— Jack Welch

116. “Nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished by a pessimist.”

— Jack Welch

117. “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”

— Jack Welch

118. “The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.”

— Jack Welch

119. “Does coaching work? Yes. Good coaches provide a truly important service. They tell you the truth when no one else will.”

— Jack Welch

120. “You measure your people and you take action on those that don’t measure up.”

— Jack Welch

121. “I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.”

— Jack Welch

122. “For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple.”

— Jack Welch

123. “If you don’t deliver, you don’t earn the flexibility.”

— Jack Welch

124. “We bring together the best ideas – turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.”

— Jack Welch

125. “When you are an individual contributor, you try to have all the answers. That’s your job – to be an expert, the best at what you do, maybe even the smartest person in the room. When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?”

— Jack Welch

126. “The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams.”

— Jack Welch

127. “The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.”

— Jack Welch

128. “In difficult times your best must be hugged, loved, kissed, rewarded, paid – everything. And your worst must be the people that leave, because your best are going to take you to the next game.”

— Jack Welch

129. “You are not a leader to win a popularity contest-you are a leader to lead.”

— Jack Welch

130. “As a leader, your job is to energize people around the mission and vision you’ve articulated.”

— Jack Welch

131. “You can’t behave in a calm, rational manner. You’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe.”

— Jack Welch

132. “Creative artists have great passion.”

— Jack Welch

133. “Protecting underperformers always backfires.”

— Jack Welch

134. “The hero is the one with ideas.”

— Jack Welch

135. “You hang around with good people, you play a lot of golf, and you have a pretty good life. That’s what success is all about. It’s getting people you like, who want to take the hill with you, who want to win, who have the passion. This is not rocket science.”

— Jack Welch

136. “When you own your choices, you own their consequences.”

— Jack Welch

137. “First and most obvious, bring out the three old warhorses of competition – cost, quality, and service – and drive them to new levels, making every person in the organization see them for what they are, a matter of survival.”

— Jack Welch

138. “Above all, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don’t stick to the established channels. They’re informal. They’re straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story.”

— Jack Welch

139. “I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside.”

— Jack Welch

140. “If you’re not in Germany, you’re not in Europe. And if you’re not in Asia, you’re nowhere.”

— Jack Welch

141. “As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.”

— Jack Welch

142. “When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?”

— Jack Welch

143. “Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.”

— Jack Welch

144. “Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.”

— Jack Welch

145. “Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.”

— Jack Welch

146. “Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.”

— Jack Welch

147. “I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.”

— Jack Welch

148. “Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance.”

— Jack Welch

149. “The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup – a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged – publicly – and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.”

— Jack Welch

150. “The story about GE that hasn’t been told is the value of an informal place. I think it’s a big thought. I don’t think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.”

— Jack Welch